But when it comes to whether tillage has any implications on nitrate loss, there have been some studies, and I know one that I saw from Iowa recently, shows a 30% reduction by switching to no-till, I would tell you my professional opinion is I can't figure out why that would happen because I see no reason that it would affect the amount of water percolating through the soil.

And I don't know, I mean, looking at, you know, one thing always comes up when I talk around the state is some of North Dakota's recommendations, too, where they've got Western North Dakota recommendations in no-till of lower nitrogen rates.

And I think some crops, mainly the one I think I know of is spring wheat.

Maybe corn, too.

So it's really hard to say in that circumstance when you're in a more arid area, you know, is that lower recommendation, you know, truly just the no-till? Is it something else the no-till is affecting? You'll say you've got more water holding capacity.

You might have a little bit better yield potential or potentially more mineralization because there's moisture there to help the microbes grow.

Stay above mineralization.

They work great in the spring, but if it rains a lot, then they clog up.

Uh, but even the soybeans are telling us that there's been a lot of nitrogen mineralized this year.

year.And I'll be somewhat curious because it seems like we have these high yielding years, and there seems to be more pressure than when we get these high yielding years since you're exporting more off the fields to jack their fertilizer rates up the next year to account for that.

But we get these good years, I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that we need more consistently, um, over, you know, over time.

I mean, yeah, uh, you, you look at some phosphorus and potash, I mean, you look at the P and K export in fields, I mean, we know that that's all tied to yield, but, um, there's still quite a bit out there.

So if your soil tests are high enough, I mean, it, it's, it's why it's, it's a good time to soil test because the price of soil tests, I mean, while it's gone up over time, I mean, it, it still is relatively cheap compared to some of the input costs out there.

So even if you're, you know, looking at trying to save costs and going to, you know, maybe from two and a half acre grids to zones, or from zones to just splitting the fields into a couple larger areas, it's just at least nice to know where things are at just to kind of start making some decisions moving forward.

I mean, we don't have necessarily that same option for nitrogen.

What are some tools that might be able to help farmers, uh, as we think about first principles this season?

How good is the quality of the work, the actual chemistry in the laboratory? How reliable is that part of this process?

The chemistry is the chemistry.

It should be reliable.

If you're using the same procedures, the same extraction solutions, the bigger thing where you can get off somewhat is that in most cases, the elements themselves that we're looking at in these extraction solutions, the machines that are being used aren't measuring them directly.

It isn't that I scan it directly.

and it's telling me exactly how much phosphorus is there.

What it does a lot of times is these machines, they're measuring absorbance or light absorbance or admittance or something that's occurring there, and you have to calibrate them to a set of what we call reference standards.

How much meaning can I read into those numbers and what do I do with that? Dan we'll go ahead and start with you on this one.

Dan, how did the heavy rainfall affect the nutrients or inputs that were already in the field?

So normally with excessive rainfall, we have concerns related to leaching of nitrate and also denitrification, which is a bigger issue for soils that you see a lot of ponding for extended periods of time.

The thing about, though, when it came this year is if you look at the growth stage, um, for most crops is usually the later on we are, the less impacted we should be with, particularly with denitrification.

And that's mainly if you look at the uptake of nitrate out of the soil from the fertilizer you apply.

Uh, there's a few pieces of data that I show at some of our meetings that Fabian Fernandez collected where they took samples at around R one growth stage.

So, you know, looking at early silking and the amount of nitrate in the top foot of the soil, really where you look at the rate that was the optimal for that given field is similar to where no nitrogen's been applied.

So I mean, really at that point in time, the crop, because it's rapidly growing and taking up nitrate at that point in time, has captured most of the fertilizer that should be in place.

Uh, we're gonna be seeing a lot of mineralization of nitrogen here in the n- in the next several weeks.

I mean, it was like one pound or one and a half pounds of nitrogen per acre per year, uh, which, uh, you know, is about as low as we possibly can get.

Yeah, and Brad, so what Brad said, I mean, really with a lot of this, if we're looking at managing things like cover crops, really it's, it's establishment, and that's really key because the amount of biomass that you have, um ...

If you look at, I'm like trying to think back to our, our fundamental section, but I think, um, some of the stats we had on there is typically, you know, biomass is anywhere from one to 3% nitrogen.

So when it comes to the amount of N taken up, it's really dependent on total amount of biomass out there in the field.

There's a balance to that, too, especially when it comes to nitrogen management.

Um, rye is a very good, um, crop if you can get it established to put on biomass and take up nitrogen, but if you get too much, then it become, it can become a problem when it comes to nitrogen management because then it actually can start tying up nitrogen.

It's one of the things we found with, um, some of the work I did with rye, especially in some of the ...

Uh, this is a way of potentially pushing that season in Minnesota.

And, uh, so there was some seminal work that was done out of Illinois, uh, looking at when the crop needs nitrogen, and, um, you know, it really kind of gives us a lot of guidance on when, uh, when split applications, uh, sh- should be happening.

And if you watch your crop, I mean, one of the things that you'll see is the lot of the uptake follows what you see visually with the growth of the crop itself.

The uptake of nitrogen isn't constant over time.

Um, it isn't a linear response.

It's, you know, if you start looking at the demand early in the growing season, um, up through about, you know, when the crop's about a foot tall, which is, you know, roughly the V4, V5 timeframe, that only about 10% of the total nitrogen taken up during the year is taken up at that point in time.

And, you know, early out in the season, too, we know that the seed does contain some nitrogen, so the, the cro- the crop itself to get established doesn't really need it.

And in the case of a lot of our soils in Minnesota, if you're, have corn following soybeans, some of the residual nitrate that was mineralized at the end of the last growing season that might still be there in the soil typically can tend to supply the crop with enough nitrogen to get us well into V6, you know, V8, V10 before we start seeing some issues.

And I guess, you know, they're not necessarily measuring nitrogen loss, but they're looking at the results of the study and saying it has been lost because they're getting a big advantage to sidedress in a lot of those landscapes.

The one thing I would caution is, is at least from the principles, if you got too much nitrogen on on July one, it will be detrimental to your quality.

Well, and that's one of the things too, the difference really, the beet, you look at the taproot, um, is, and they're just factories for extracting nitrate and converting it to sugar.

I mean, it's really what that beet is out there doing that they're pretty efficient, and that taproot'll go down quite a ways where you can extract a fair amount of nitrate, even if it's moved a little bit deeper in the profile.

And some of the studies I've been looking at, tissue testing, you know, John, you kind of cautioned me against that, um, and you know, I will say that it is somewhat problematic using like a petiole test.

Um, you know, we're kind of targeting some different times, but you know, I think the, if you're gonna do it, the ideal time would be the f- the first of July.

The problem is though, it really didn't do a good job of predicting where I needed a response with it, and a lot of that's because if you're dealing with petioles, it's the nitrate is transient in it, so it isn't necessarily that it's, it's not a storage structure, so you can be impacted by conditions around the time you're sampling if it's translocating nitrate or not.

So it's, it kind of makes me somewhat skeptical of whether we can use that in combination with, like, in-season samp- or in-season applications to try to correct for some deficiencies.

Dan, could you bring us up to speed?

You know, it'll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out a little bit, too.

Well, then if you're planting it more densely.

I mean, so if I...

It's, if say, the uptake's 10% less, but I, I plant 10% more, the total biomass is about the same, then it r- really doesn't matter in terms of overall uptake.

But I mean, the main thing we're dealing with when it comes to loss is that loss is a percentage of the total that we apply.

I mean, so, I mean, if you look at loss from spring to fall, we can't think that, you know, we're just gonna lose 10 pounds.

Um, you know, we've, we're probably gonna lose some, something more like 10, tw- you know, just throwing a number out there, 10, 20% or s- something.

Well, might, it might be from a climate standpoint, but that's not really our focus right now.